John Wilkes Booth did indeed sympathize with the South, but as this intriguing family history of the Booths reveals, his decision to assassinate Abraham Lincoln may have stemmed more from his desire to outshine his older brother. "Filled with ambition, rivalry, betrayal, and tragedy, this story of the celebrated Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and the two sons, Edwin and John Wilkes, who competed to wear his crown, is as gripping as a fine work of fiction," writes Lincoln historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in her foreword. She calls Nora Titone's debut history "the best account I have ever read of the complex forces that led John Wilkes Booth to carry a gun into Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865."

"The tale has vibrant leads, including Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, a famous tragedian and raging alcoholic, and his domineering brother Edwin, the biggest stage star of the Civil War era. Then there's John Wilkes himself, a narcissist and hilariously bad actor—Titone regales readers with scathing reviews—whose good looks and hammy onstage swordplay drew crowds.... Titone's account paints a colorful panorama of 19th-century theatrical life, with its endless drunken touring through frontier backwaters and showbiz pratfalls. Neither deep nor tragic, her John Wilkes is oddly convincing: the first of the grandiose hollow men in America's cast of assassins."—Publishers Weekly